Kongregate Sidebar Firefox Extension

today @lunch I was annoyed once again by not being able to easily browse through the badges I still need to achieve. Not a big issue for normal people you would say, but for me it was enough to start developing a Firefox extension to make my life just that little bit more easy.

I think for me this extension currently does what I want, but I don’t think all of you will agree, and that’s the reason why I would like you all to have a look at it. Give me your suggestions, request other features, and help me test it a bit more.

I currently developed the user interface as a sidebar because the badges require quite some space (the image of a badge). But I did separate the “business” logic from the user interface, so if anyone has a better idea of how to display these badges, I should be able to quite easily implement it.

For now, the extension works as follows:

1. Install it using the link below, and restart Firefox…

2. You can toggle the sidebar on (like any other sidebar) in your View/Sidebar menu, or by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + K

3. On first use you will be asked to enter your Kongregate user name (I will add some options window to reset change this I think?)

4. Wait a bit for it to load, the Kongregate badges page is not the fastest page…

Questions and things I’m not sure of:

1. I currently support the following filter/sort modes for your badges, can you think of more? Unachieved by date/Unachieved by difficulty/All by date.

2. Would a different user interface, other then the sidebar, be preferable, and what would that be?

not bad, my images are elongated, showing a white band at the bottom, but other than that not bad, it also never seems to stop loading. Are you using the view all badges page or the limited badges page?
I look forward to future additions.

- Added a "Current Card’ display, will only show if you have not yet completed it, cause when you have, it’s not that interesting anymore IMO.

- Added a toolbar button to toggle the sidebar (add it through the View/Toolbars/Customize menu).

- Fixed some bugs in searching/filtering, filter is now remembered across browsing sessions.

- Tweaked the user interface a bit… Not sure yet how to make the user info look
better, ideas?

- Removed automatic reloading, took too long and was not that useful.

- Tested on Firefox 3 beta 5.

@nerdrock101, “All” Firefox extensions also work on a Mac (and on Linux, and on a pda, and on…)

@William_Wilson, The images should now be fixed, but since I did not notice the problem in my 3 Firefox’s I’m not sure of it. If it is still there, could you mail me a screenshot? extensions[at]captaincaveman.nl

@Katsu, Since this information is not on the account page, it will take quite a bit more time to also load the “points for next level” info, so I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Would more people like to see this at the cost of 3-4 seconds?

If you click the “View” button, you can select what you want to see. One of the options there is “All by date” which will show you all the Kongregate badges. Or did you mean you would like a new filter that only shows the achieved badges?

We have around 175,000 registered Kongregate users who use Firefox (though it’s been growing quite fast lately as you may have noticed!) and a little over a 1 million unregistered users who use Firefox. I assume the extension will only really interest the registered users, though, since the guests can’t earn badges.

I think we’re okay with having you publish it to addons.mozilla.org, and definitely let us know if gets popular enough that the new page is needed. We’re going to be redoing the badges page anyway in the semi-near future anyway, so we could probably do it pretty easily then.

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